Detective Corgi and the Spooky Mansion was Broom Cupboard's third project that I led. It's a non-linear story game using Twine and is available to play on itch.io. I've been wanting to make something in Twine for awhile...plus with everyone busy during the month of June, I thought it would be a short, fun project. I wanted to make something lighthearted, silly and about a corgi. If you want to play, here's the link: https://broomcupboard.itch.io/detective-corgi.

Process

Crazy SchedulesThe team was busy and everyone had various schedules that made a lot of conflict for meetings or assigning due dates. To make things easier, I tried to make this project more independent for everyone and check in with the team individually for progress or updated content. We had a couple scheduled meetings to make sure everything was coming together and talk more about the story. Those meetings were pretty fun blurbing out "what if" statements of silly or ridiculous ideas for the puzzles and characters.

Story

I wanted this story to be fun and a bit ridiculous since we didn't have a lot of time to plan out for a deep, intricate story. Ben pitched different stories and made an entire twine outline after I selected which story to work on. I divided the story into 7 segments and had everyone choose what part of the story they would like to work on. They would fill in text for the game and make illustrations or animations.

Original pitch for Detective Corgi and the Spooky Mansion:

Detective Corgi #34: The Case of the Spooky ShackWow! Detective Corgi’s on the case in the latest adventure in this award-winning children’s book series, now brought to life on the internet screen!! Inspired by old campy books like Encyclopedia Brown, The Hardy Boys, The Boxcar Children, or Nancy Drew, this story follows Detective Corgi trying to solve the mysteries of the Spooky Shack, a ~mysterious~ haunted house. We could make fake old book covers, VHS tapes, and generally lo-fi up this story to make it feel very 90’s. Also, it could be really funny to make this intentionally feel like a very 90’s “INTERNET IS COOL!” experience, where this story is supposedly the first time that a Detective Corgi book was ever brought to the internet, and that is a BIG DEAL!!!If you want to read the other pitches: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q_FHKt6IwZm5NhyP-UxyCluP8jXlrX6bmn9hjEw55wM/edit?usp=sharing

Art

To keep things fun and allow everyone to produce quick content, I tried not to restrict the art style too much and made a simple guideline.

ColorHere's some reference of the color pallet I wanted. Basically everyone could color their illustrations however they wanted but needed to stick with these colors.

StyleThe illustrations needed to be flat, 2d and very simple. I wasn't super picky about the line style, but I wanted to keep it doodly/cartoony and not realistic.